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Books, April-June 2025

Normal Rules Don't Apply - Kate Atkinson

Learned by Heart - Emma Donoghue

All Things are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess - Becca Rothfeld [dnf; in the end it was too much]

Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World - Mary Beard

Confounding Oaths - Alexis Hall

My Good Bright Wolf: A Memoir - Sarah Moss [this needs a boatload of warnings for disordered eating, yet somehow - maybe because it was so unsparing yet also straightforward about being the construction of an unreliable narrator - I also found it, oddly, not that triggering: a terrible harm too individual to be transferred]

Boston Women's Heritage Trail: Seven Self-guided Walks Through Four Centuries of Boston Women's History (Rev. 3rd ed.) - Polly Welts Kaufman, Jean Gibran, Sylvia McDowell, Mary Howland Smoyer [this edition is from 2006, and what I noticed was how much of Boston wasn't there: everything south of the South End (credit to the the current online version, which has added Dorchester, Roxbury, Hyde Park, and JP)]

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Clay loom weight decorated with an owl, Greek, 5th Century BCE

From the Acropolis Museum

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Books, January-March 2025

The Postcard - Anne Berest, translated by Tina Kover

Some Desperate Glory - Emily Tesh * [absolutely loved this; gigantic leap forward from her novellas (which I enjoyed!); surprised me several times, and does an excellent job of responding to the misogynist space fascism of traditional military sf without falling into the trap of creating a girlboss heroine who's grown up within it but somehow been entirely unshaped by it]

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World - Robin Wall Kimmerer [truthfully I think Braiding Sweetgrass is better, but I also think this was published for the people who need it at the moment when they needed it (In my more cynical moments, fueled by unadmirable spite or despair or an understanding of my own failures, I do wonder how many people read about mutual aid and then say "oh yes, I have read A Bestseller about that" and then close the book and never think about it again)]

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January: A Year of Good Reading Ahead. A child pulls a sleigh full of books toward a house in this poster from the Chicago, Illinois WPA Federal Art Project. Illustrated between 1936 and 1941.

(January: A Year of Good Reading Ahead | WPA Posters)

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Books, September-December 2024

Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation - Tiya Miles

The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight - Andrew Leland

We Loved it All: A Memory of Life - Lydia Millet

Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution - Menno Schilthuizen

Trust & Safety - Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman

The Jane Austen Cookbook - Maggie Black and Deirdre Le Faye

Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet - Hannah Ritchie [Interesting throughout, extremely convincing at times, and chirpily, naively positive, with more than a whiff of the effective altruism girlie - of course the math makes sense, we just have to do it! - which finally becomes explicit in the conclusion (my effective altruism rant, which I will spare you in full - and to be fair, this book is very far from its worst exemplar - has a lot to do with its practitioners' tendency to fixate so completely on the numbers that they see ALL of the inefficiencies and frictions of humans being human as only avoidable weaknesses, rather than the sometimes necessary work of living in community. And look, I, too, hate having feelings in public, and find attending community garden commission meetings screamingly frustrating, but every so often both of those things just have to happen.)]

Longbourn - Jo Baker *

The Wood at Midwinter - Susanna Clarke

A Nobleman’s Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel - KJ Charles

The Way Home - Peter S. Beagle [Given how much "Two Hearts" made me sob the first time I read it, I should have known better, but now we can add the SeaTac north satellite and seat 20F of a Boeing 737 at midnight to the list of places I've publicly wept over someone's writing...which is an accomplishment, since I also didn't much care for, and sometimes actively disliked, quite a bit of "Sooz"; it's not that Beagle can't write from the perspective of teenage girls - see the master class that is the entirety of Tamsin - but this time the plot comes with more than a whiff of well-meaning dudeness and the fact that it's in first person absolutely does not help]

The New Naturals - Gabriel Bump

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Rock, Pebble, Stone - Sarah Ross-Thompson

British , b. 1965 -

Collagraph , 34 x 34 cm. Ed. 30.

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“The roots and springs of the Valley were always wild. The patterns of the grapestakes and the pruned vines, the rows of grey olive trees and the formal splendor of flowering almond orchards, the sharp-footed sheep and the dark-eyed cattle, the wineries of stone, the old barns, the mills down by the water, the little shady towns, these are beautiful, humane, enduring, but the roots of the Valley are the roots of the digger pine, the scrub oak, the wild grasses careless and uncared for, and the springs of those creeks rise among the rifts of earthquake, among rocks from the floors of seas that were before there were human beings and from the fires inside the earth. The roots of the Valley are in wildness, in dreaming, in dying, in eternity. The deer trails there, the footpaths and the wagon tracks, they pick their way around the roots of things. They don’t go straight. It can take a lifetime to go thirty miles, and come back.”

— “Where It Is,” Always Coming Home - Ursula K. Le Guin

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Spring bunnies and dandelions print

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0% mystical, 100% sitting around with your own preoccupations, but still I think the technical interpretation here is “well, holy shit, I guess”

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Emmanuel Sougez. Two women looking out to sea, 1920.

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Fake books that I’ve made SUPERPOST!!! https://suricrasia.online/library/

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The K-Pop Cat Agenda

tagged by @tautline-hitch for 10 tracks from my On Repeat, but one thing to be clear about before we start: Spotify is for k-pop.

People / Agust D [2023's SOTY, holding in 1st place on this playlist since January and making a strong bid for a repeat victory]

Holssi / IU [somebody had to be at baby's first k-pop concert, and making it IU and our 20,000 closest Korean-speaking friends was a great choice]

Hype Boy / NewJeans [if we're picking things from the NewJeans catalogue, I'm honestly surprised this is higher on the list than Super Shy, and also that it beats out both Le Sserafim and (G)I-DLE]

What You Waiting For / Jeon Somi [somehow I'm in my Jeon Somi era right now, and I'm not quite sure how it happened?]

1-800-hot-n-fun / Le Sserafim [I am a mess mess mess, but they are not. <3]

Wife / (G)I-DLE [my mother, getting the point instantly even without pop music experience or mv subtitles: is this allowed???]

Accendio / Ive [bring it on, you witchy body double bad girls]

Sugar Rush / Bibi - [I love everything about this, the filthiest song of 2024, including that it shares album space with Bam Yang Gang, 2024's sweetest breakup song]

Smeraldo Garden Marching Band / Jimin, feat. Loco [Face was a riskier, more interesting album than Muse is, but it's growing on me. You know, though, something that occured to me about my bias: he never puts moppets in his mvs, and that's a great call.]

Lucifer / SHINee [sometimes there's a guy who likes to preach loudly about the wages of sin on our street, and when he does I crank the volume and play this out the window. I don't think he cares for it. Petty? Sure, but if it's good enough for the Seoul pride parade, it's good enough for me. I usually follow it up with Guilty, just to get a really good dose of Catholic guilt in there: thanks, Taemin.]

...plus one, because Supernova finally won me over on Aespa's ultra-aggressive, jerky transitions (still can't with Next Level, though)

Tagging @sea-changed and anyone else who hasn't gotten this umpteen times already (or who has and feels like doing it anyway).

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Imants Tillers (Australia, 1950 - ) Kangaroo Blank, 1988 oilstick, gouache, synthetic polymer paint 78 canvas boards, nos. 16231 - 16308 installation 213.0 (h) x 195.0 (w) cm

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The children in this neighborhood are savage; I'm not going up against them for anything:

Child 1, heckling Child 3: "He hasn't touched grass since that soccer game when he was four!"

Child 2: "That was artificial turf."

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Books, July-August 2024

The English Experience - Julie Schumacher [I thought Dear Committee Members was excellent, and The Shakespeare Requirement too realistically curmudgeonly to be funny; The English Experience is closer to the first, and what Schumacher writes especially well are the inadvertent, unrecognized profundities of students writing very badly]

Come and Get It - Kiley Reid [the last 80ish pages: damn. damn!]

Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia - Christina Thompson

Weather - Jenny Offill

War Among Ladies - Eleanor Scott ["Books about education" seems to be July's unintentional theme; this quietly vicious short novel about the bureaucratic, relentless grinding down of women's potential makes me want to reread South Riding]

Orbital - Samantha Harvey [didn't feel certain about this in the first couple of pages, but my god it's made of stars] *

All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis - edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson [the chapters with good writing are overwhelmed by the many tedious essay versions of a "thank you for coming to my TED talk" pitchdeck; dnf]

High Times in the Low Parliament - Kelly Robson [I was on a plane]

Curious Tides - Pascale Lacelle [one of those all vibes/no classes dark academia settings; looming signs of YA love triangle; dnf]

The Manuscripts Club: The People Behind a Thousand Years of Medieval Manuscripts - Christopher de Hamel [I suddenly, desperately want to know what de Hamel - a former Sotheby's employee himself - thinks of The Stegosaurus Auction, aka the most nsfw sfw video I have seen this year]

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Alpine

From a series of silhouette watercolors done in 2018. (Available as a postcard here.)

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Grackle embroidery; I decided to try using some of my stash of old sewing thread that is too brittle for the machine; it worked great! by 9-year-cicada